Under This Terrible Sun

by Under This Terrible Sun (retail) (epub)

  Chapter 33

  On the sidewalk, Danielito realized that the noise of the dogs really was much louder from outside than it was from in the house. The two policemen said goodbye with a handshake, got into their patrol car, and turned off its lights, and left. Danielito went back into the house to get something from under his pillow. He took out his father’s pistol, assembled it, and opened the door to the yard a few centimeters. The dogs rushed at him. Torito tried to get his head through the door, barking and biting; Danielito pushed the wound on his eye against the edge of the door without it seeming to hurt him—he still strained to get inside. Danielito held the door with one hand, and with the other he held the gun to the dog’s head and fired. The dog went limp instantly, and for a few seconds he was only held up by the pressure Danielito exerted against the door. After the shot the female dog ran off, still barking, to the opposite corner of the yard, and she waited for him there in a defiant pose. Danielito wasn’t up to a one-on-one confrontation, he could end up hurt. From behind the door he painstakingly lined up the front and rear sights with the dog’s body and fired again. Even with the ringing in his ears from the two shots, he could hear the impact of the bullet going in, a blow like that of a stone falling into water (or maybe not water, but some kind of thicker fluid). A short jet of blood spurted from the dog’s taut belly. The barking got worse, longer and more pitiful. She had stopped paying attention to him, and she ran around as if she were circling something, trying to see her wound. Danielito went over carefully, and from a safe distance he fired at her head. The dog collapsed on the ground and fell silent, but she wasn’t completely dead. She was blinking, looking at what she could, which (Danielito assumed based on the position she had fallen in) would be a wide field of concrete turned ninety degrees, and maybe part of his shoes, which wouldn’t look like they were moving from one side to the other, but rather up and down. He went into the house and found some standard-size trash bags and some duct tape. He hadn’t finished getting Torito’s head into a bag when the doorbell rang. It was Duarte; he was pale, he asked what had happened for the police to come.

  “The neighbor from across the yard called because the dogs were going crazy and barking a lot,” answered Danielito. “But it’s all OK. I already talked to the neighbor, too; he knows my mom, there’s no problem.”

  “And what did you tell them.”

  “Pretty much the truth. That they were my mom’s dogs and they were nervous because they weren’t at their house. I told them I had just given them sedatives in their food and we had to wait until they took effect.”

  Duarte relaxed a bit. He told Danielito he’d been about to pull into the driveway, when he’d seen the patrol car by the door; he had just about shit his pants. He took a couple turns around the block before he saw them leave alone, and he’d parked the car six blocks away, just in case.

  “Did they come in?”

  “Yes, but I took them through the garage hallway so they could see the dogs. One of them asked me to save some puppies for him, when they had them. He gave me his number and everything.”

  “And what was wrong with the dogs.”

  “It’s the pills. I gave them the ones my mom gave me when I brought them here, it’s the same drug but it hit them with a different effect, and they just went nuts. I couldn’t go out into the yard.”

  “They’re not barking now,” said Duarte. Danielito explained that he had just killed them. He led Duarte to the yard for a quick inspection, and told him the story in detail.

  “And where did you get a gun.”

  “It’s my father’s pistol.”

  “Didn’t you say your mother burned everything?”

  “Yeah, but I kept the gun.”

  While Danielito finished wrapping the dogs in bags, Duarte went down to the basement. Out of bodies, tape, and bags, Danielito made two solid parcels, functional for transporting. He used almost a whole roll of tape. Then he cleaned the blood off the flagstones with a hose and mop. When he was drying off, Duarte appeared in the door to the yard and asked him to help. The old woman was standing in the living room, dressed in a light blue jogging suit. She was blindfolded and gagged and her wrists were tied behind her back. Duarte asked Danielito for the keys to the van.

  “They’re in the ignition.”

  The three of them went to the garage. The woman went first, guided by Duarte with his hands on her shoulders, saying things like, “Careful, sweetie pie, watch the stairs.” Duarte took the keys from the car and opened the trunk.

  “Be a tough girl now, sweetie, we’re going to put you in the trunk.”

  The old woman obeyed, and they settled her in on top of some cardboard.

  “There we go.”

  Duarte bound her feet with a zip tie and slammed the trunk closed. He gave Danielito the keys to his car, told him where he had left it, and told him to bring it to his house at siesta time, around two thirty in the afternoon.

  “I have to pick up my mother’s ashes at two, so I might be a little later.”

  Duarte told him that was no problem, but not to screw things up, this thing with the dogs was already a fuck-up. He got into the car and started the engine. Danielito opened the garage door for him. He closed it after Duarte left, and then he sat down to smoke weed and watch TV: a documentary on suspension bridges and steel cable technology and another very interesting one about the sinking of the Bismarck in May of 1941. He ate lunch at exactly twelve: a bottle of beer and chicken ravioli. Before leaving for the cemetery, he parked the car in front of his house for five minutes and loaded the dogs into the back. He arrived punctually at the cemetery, and they gave him the ashes in a plywood box with a brand burned into the top that said “Municipality of Lapachito.” He drove to his mother’s house. He opened the door to the garage and unloaded the dogs and the ashes and left them, with some apprehension, just inside the door. The parcels were stiffer now, even more so than when he had wrapped them up. He closed the door again, got into the truck, and at a quarter to three he arrived at Duarte’s.

  * * *

  The woman was asleep on a mattress in the second bedroom of the house, with her eyes blindfolded and her hands and feet bound. Duarte had drugged her so they could move her safely, and he asked Danielito to help him secure the room some. They worked for a long time. Duarte took the mattress from his bed and propped it against the middle of the wall that the house shared with the one next door. They also moved a large carob-wood wardrobe and set it with its doors against the mattress. They moved the rest of the furniture to the living room, making as little noise as possible, and they left the room bare. Duarte knelt down on the mattress next to the woman, removed her bonds, and spread lotion over the abrasions, greasily rubbing her skin. The woman let him do it, unconscious, her muscles flaccid and unresponsive. Danielito left, went into the living room, and started to watch TV. After a while Duarte called to him from the doorway. He had bandaged the woman’s wrists and had bound her again, tightening the zip tie over the bandages. He had also gagged her so she couldn’t speak but was able to breathe comfortably. Duarte showed him the key to the door and demonstrated how to lock and unlock it, because it had a little trick to it. He told Danielito he was going to Resistencia now, but he figured he’d be back that night, and to call him if anything happened. Danielito spent the afternoon smoking weed and watching TV, getting up every once in a while to check on the woman, or to look at Duarte’s little airplanes in their displays.

  * * *

  Duarte came back at a quarter to nine in a very good mood. He had bought food, milanesa a la napolitana with French fries for the two of them, and hake with mashed potatoes for the woman. He asked Danielito if she was awake. Danielito told him that the last time he had looked in on her she was moving a little, but not like she was awake, more like she was dreaming.

  “OK, I’ll feed her myself, later.”

  Duarte took a beer out of the fridge and poured himself a glass. He offered one to Danielito, who declined. T
hey ate directly from the little plastic trays and drank from the bottle (Danielito went with Coca-Cola), watching a documentary about the aerial battles between Israeli and Jordanian fighter planes in June 1967, with very realistic computer generated reenactments. Duarte finished his cutlet, collapsed into an armchair, and lit a joint. A slower eater, Danielito finished his French fries first and made a sandwich with what was left of his cutlet. He was tired and wanted to shower. He told Duarte he was leaving.

  “Wait a little while, I can’t move right now, and I have to open the garage door for you. Give me fifteen minutes. Hand me the remote.”

  Danielito gave him the remote control, and Duarte changed it to Animal Planet, which was running a program about the snakes of the Chapare in Bolivia.

  “Ah,” he said, pointing to the top of a bookshelf, “there are the photos of the boa constrictor your dad and I found.”

  Danielito went over to the shelf and picked up a sheaf of old black and white photos. The first one showed five men who were lifting up the cadaver of a boa that was almost six meters long. Three of the men were wearing army uniforms, the other two had on flight suits, with no rank stripes in sight: one was Duarte and the other was Danielito’s father. His father was looking down, as though examining the snake’s skin or some other detail.

  “We ran over it with one of the trucks, at first we thought it was a pipe. It stretched across the road, and you couldn’t see its head or tail. The truck didn’t hurt it at all, we had to shoot it to kill it.”

  Other photos documented the opening of the boa’s stomach, from which they had in fact extracted an entire piglet.

  “And what did you do with the piglet.”

  “Nothing, what could we do? It might have swallowed the thing a couple of days earlier. We threw it away, we weren’t about to eat it.”

  There was also a photo of Duarte and Danielito’s father under the wing of a Cessna Skymaster, painted grey and with no registration number in view, and with the copilot’s door removed. They were leaning against the wing strut, in flight suits again, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses. The phone rang, Duarte got up to answer.

  “Ah, what’s up, kid, how’s it going.”

  The photos were loose, set out on top of a manila envelope. He looked inside the envelope and took out more photos of the same size and texture as the others, apparently developed from the same roll of film. They looked like photos for a record of facilities and equipment: jail cells, trucks, a meeting room. They were photos of rural operations, with most of the military men dressed as civilians. In the background of one, you could see a truck riddled with bullet holes. Between the mud flaps and the start of the bed, which was the portion he could see, Danielito counted nine large holes. His father was kneeling down with his right arm resting on his knee, holding his pistol (the same gun with which Danielito had recently killed the dogs) in his hand. There were three people lying down beside him, but their faces had been obscured with white correction fluid. This last photo had apparently been taken at night: a scene frozen in the explosion of the flash. Then they were back in the Skymaster. With the door removed you could see the inside of the plane. His father was in the pilot’s seat looking serious, checking the instruments. In the back seat, Duarte was looking at the camera but without posing, as if someone had called his name just before pressing the shutter. Danielito put the photos back in their envelope and returned them to the shelf. He wanted to leave, but Duarte was still on the phone.

  “Listen, you’ve called at just the right time,” Duarte said to the person on the other end of the line. “Thing is, I just might have to go see some people down your way… maybe it’s worth my while to bring it to you, and we can do some business, because I just might need a favor from you, too.”

  On the TV, an arboreal snake from the Bolivian Chapare was swallowing eggs from a magpie’s nest.

  “Do you have a phone where I can reach you?… Oh, OK, no, then call me again tomorrow morning and I’ll have a better idea of what I’m going to do. Around midday, one, one thirty, let’s say.”

  Chapter 34

  Right after he got off the phone with Duarte, Cetarti felt a little disappointed. On the way to the phone booth, he was looking forward to spending hours on the road. He had thought how, to go back to Lapachito, he would need to take a bus that would stop in different towns along the way. He felt like traveling in the front seat on the top level, watching the highway stripes go by. Getting off the bus at dawn in small-town stations that he imagined as completely empty, or in service stations. By the time he was back at his brother’s house, he thought that the important thing was that he had gotten weed and the possibility of a little more money and that, in the worst case, the thing would drag out over a couple of days. Afterwards he could go where he wanted, limited only by the money he had available.

  * * *

  At ten in the morning the next day, two men from the secondhand store came in a truck. For the things in the living room (before going to bed, Cetarti had removed the pornographic movies from the pile), they offered 250 pesos, and for the paper, cardboard, and bottles, 180. He accepted, adding it up: 430 pesos. He brought them into the kitchen and asked how much they would give him for the fridge and the wardrobe. Another three hundred pesos. They told him if he wanted, they would give him 150 for the TV. Cetarti told them it wasn’t for sale. While the men loaded the other things, Cetarti emptied out the refrigerator and wardrobe. He hid the drawer with the insects under his mattress, and after they left he put it on the counter, next to the fish tank. He sat on the mattress and counted the money he had left: 12,740 pesos and change. He smoked while flipping through channels on TV until it was time to call Duarte. He decided against buying a car, it didn’t make sense. With a car and weed it would be problematic to cross any borders, it would be easier on a bus. Because he had also started to think of that: he could leave the country. He thought of Brazil; he liked the idea of being on the beach and being a foreigner. To hear a different language, to not understand the people.

  Chapter 35

  Less hunched over and a little more secure in her movements, his mother walked up to the head of the snake (an enormous boa constrictor) and fired. The snake didn’t stop moving. Danielito was afraid, and he told his mother that the snake was still alive.

  “No, no,” said his mother. “Snakes go on moving after they’re dead, for a long time.”

  His mother moved to an especially lumpy part of the boa’s body, and she took out a knife. She opened the body with one slice of the knife, and from inside she took out a piglet, its limbs dislocated and most of its bones broken. Suddenly, Danielito felt an intense need to urinate. He took his eyes from the scene and discovered that they were in the Gancedo cemetery, under the piercing sun. He started to look for a place to urinate, but suddenly there were people everywhere in the cemetery, watching him. It was impossible to urinate without someone seeing. He felt like his bladder was about to explode, but precisely thanks to that pain he was able to realize the strangeness of the situation, that he was dreaming, and to wake up before he wet the bed. Coming back from the bathroom, he poured himself a glass of Coca-Cola from the fridge and drank it sitting in the darkness of the kitchen. Then he went back to bed and slept like a log. In the morning he lingered over breakfast, watching the news on TV. He thought with very little enthusiasm about how he had to go bury the dogs. The task presented no great problem for him; what he didn’t want to do was to go to his mother’s house. It had been a stupid idea to leave them there. And he had to go, no matter what, they must already be bloated and starting to smell. He got dressed, rolled a joint, and looked for the keys to his mother’s house. Before opening the garage door, he went to the yard and loaded a bag of quicklime into his car.

  * * *

  The dogs were, in fact, already bloated and smelling. The packaging had been effective, the bags and tape had held up under the change in volume, but the stench was overpowering. Thanks to the marijuana, the operation of digging
the hole (a meter and a half by two meters wide, two meters deep) was manageable. He dumped the bag of quicklime on top of the bodies, and then added half-meter layers of dirt, packing one down before adding another. Then he went back to the door, grabbed the box with his mother’s ashes, went to the bathroom and poured them into the toilet. He pushed the button to flush three times, until there was no trace of grey left against the white of the bowl. His father’s ashes and the shoebox with the bones of the boy they had gone to Gancedo to get were easy to find: they were in his mother’s bed, on the side she didn’t sleep on. He threw his father’s ashes in the toilet, and he did the same with the bones of the previous carrier of his name, although first he had to put them in a bag and crush them with a hammer so they would be small enough to flush. Then he went to the yard with the two wooden urns and the cardboard box and set fire to them with alcohol and matches.